The
Warp

Aftermath
of Cathy (5)

The
vote for ‘Cathy’ was a vote for documentary drama as a
whole. Media mandarins so far have largely failed to get the
message. Theirs has been a failure to face up to the viewers’
need for hard facts in drama, a lack of seriousness, a failure in
leadership.

Many
media mandarins do not even have a clear understanding of the
difference between conventional drama and documentary drama.

No
standards are set so that, for a public which I believe would really
like to know whether what is being shown is true or partly true, or
interesting but not representative, or boring but representative, it
is not possible to tell how true to fact a drama is. Mandarins
could, for example, label documentary drama from one to ten, marking
how close the ‘reality’ it presents is to reality as,
say, a journalist on a serious newspaper would see it.

The
non-contextualised treatment of, for example, much of Ken Loach’s
more recent work, even if its theme is ostensibly serious, deflects
discussion to an experiential rather than a political level.

The
BBC was slow to follow up the potential of documentary drama which we
explored in ‘Cathy’. Plays like ‘Days of Hope’,
for example, were a series of stories placed in a historical setting
and chosen to illustrate a particular theme, but did not provide
viewers with guidelines as to what in them was invented and what
true.

Ken
Loach and Tony Garnett were the obvious people to continue the genre
of ‘Cathy’ since they had respectively directed and
produced it for the BBC. Despite the immense respect I have for
both, and despite the many scrapes we’ve been through together,
I do have to say that I think it a pity that they, bending under the
pressures exerted on them by people like Sydney Newman and Huw
Weldon, did not go on to firm up and exploit the wonderful and
potentially so important new strand of docudrama, but instead
withdrew into a world of largely non contextualised drama.

Tony
Garnett has said he now feels that the problems

(X)

of
documentary drama outweigh its advantages. ‘It begs more
questions than it answers ... I’ve got ethical objections to
drama documentary. In fiction, the audience are in no doubt, so
keeping faith with the audience is easier,’ he told Derek
Paget, Reader in Drama at Worcester College.

Ken
Loach too now feels that the greater leeway given

(X)

to
fiction is an advantage. ‘There’s a wide tolerance in
fiction. In documentaries, the constraints are much more narrow,’
he told Jeremy Isaacs on ‘Face to Face’ in 1994.

This,
I think, is a cop-out for both Tony and Ken. What made Ken’s
‘Ladybird, Ladybird’, which treats some themes similar to
those in ‘Cathy’, so much less important in terms of
actually producing any social change is that it never made it clear
whether what we’re being shown is an individual isolated tragic
story unconnected with major trends in our society, or whether it is
an example of something bad that is happening all the time and which
as citizens we should address. If the latter, there is little in the
film that tells us this. Ken has abandoned the political
possibilities in favour of the telling of a particularised story,
albeit telling it powerfully.

So,
the viewer watching this harrowing film may ask ‘So what? If
it is not telling me something important about the society I live in,
which I ought to know and if necessary act on, why am I putting
myself through all

this?’
(Please see Appendix 1)

(X)

And
so the trend continues. The vote for ‘Cathy’ was far
more than a vote for just ‘Cathy’ and was a vote for
serious docudrama as a whole. Media management has failed to
understand this, let alone provide our audience with what it has
asked for.

The
rot and imprecision extends in the world of cinema films as well.
The film ‘Michael Collins’, true to known facts in so
many respects, threw away its credibility in a contrived ending that
was much less dramatic than was the actual ending of the heroic
Michael Collins.

‘Titanic’
left out the breakaway of the stern and the sinking of the stern that
was an important and devastating feature of what actually happened.

‘Amistad’
placed an entirely invented character in the middle of an apparently
true story.

In
‘Braveheart’ William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, was
shown having an affair with and a child by Isabelle, the Princess of
Wales, despite the fact that she did not set foot in Britain until
some while after Wallace had been hung, drawn and quartered.

In
much of the media world it seems now to be accepted that truth must
always be altered in order to create a ‘watchable’ story.
(See Appendix 2)

Such
things are not bad in themselves. But I believe there are millions
like me who need to know whether what we are seeing is true to the
known facts or is fabrication. On the part of the mandarin class,
there has been a failure to understand this and a failure to provide
proper guidelines.

The
exclusion of excellence from our screens is a tragedy. The weakest
link in any chain determines the strength of the whole. That weak
link in the media chain, I believe, is not among the professionals,
camerapersons, writers, sound technicians. It’s among the
ranks of the script editors, project development executives, fat cats
of that ilk.

Media
management are lacking in leadership potential. A document called
‘BBC Single Drama Submission Guidelines’, sent out to
both inexperienced writers and those at the top of their profession,
disturbingly suggests even a lack of proper literacy.

The
document, which is unsigned, begins with a classic

(X)

piece
of gobbledegook; ‘with regard to your recent enquiry/
submission, writers should ensure all submissions are clearly
marked’. The gobbledegook becomes even more murky, and leads
on to this following very choice bloom in the garden of non-literacy;

‘If
sending in a treatment, you do not need to complete the following:

Each
script should be accompanied by the following:

Up
to two lines with the title and genre of the piece, including when
and where it is set.’

This
is not taken out of context. It really is as obscure as it sounds.

‘The
quality of writing we expect from a BBC drama is of the highest
standard,’ the same slovenly document tells us later, and then
gives some patronising advice, which professional writers must find
particularly irksome, about where guidelines on screenplay format,
writing courses and writing workshops can be found.

It’s
as if artist entrants to the Royal Academy summer show were sent a
document detailing where they can access courses in painting by
numbers; or musicians performing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall were
handed details of where to buy keyboards with a one finger auto chord
accompaniment facility.

I
think it is important to question how writers for television are ever
to learn to use language well when those in authority use words so
sloppily.

Such
basic literacy malfunction at so fundamental a level does not
harbinger well for ability in those who have the power to commission
programmes. ‘Cathy’ may have slipped through by
subterfuge, but that gives little ground for confidence in our media
management. For every ‘Cathy’ that makes it, how many
blockbusters, important programmes that could enrich our lives and
leaven our society and bear testimony to our common humanity, are
strangled before birth by media mandarins?

And,
in the case of ‘Cathy’ and the hard-hitting tradition it
could have initiated, the inertia of a frightened leadership has
meant that what could have been an important new strand, bringing
glory to the BBC and to all television, was instead aborted.

6

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